As the four major cablecos involved in a quadruple play joint venture with Sprint get ready to launch initial services, they may face another rival apart from the incumbent telcos, themselves moving towards quad play with a combination of fiber-to-the-home, IPTV, and their cellular arms.

So, HP has paid a small fortune for “tarnished” Mercury Software, has it? Perhaps it has got a bargain, as Mercury's technology is excellent and it has a good reputation for "Business Technology Optimisation" (aka "testing", in the widest possible sense) in big companies.

And so to lunch with Martin Richmond-Coggan, VP EMEA at Applix, ostensibly to talk about its acquisition of Temtec BI visualisation software. Apparently, Applix's TM1 combined with Temtec's Executive Viewer is proving much more attractive than TM1 alone to potential customers using Essbase and wondering what its strategic future is.

Rambus has accepted the damages award granted to it by a jury following its patent clash victory over Hynix but last week slashed by the presiding judge. Hynix will pay the memory technology firm $133.6m instead of the originally awarded $306.5m.

Nvidia's SLI multi-GPU technology will soon work with Intel-made chipsets, it has been alleged. The claim came after the graphics chip company began highlighting the number of Intel Core 2 Duo-based desktops that support SLI.

Another Dell laptop has undergone spontaneous combustion, prompting the evacuation of the office it was situated in and the urgent intervention of the local fire brigade. Pictures of the incident point to a battery meltdown as the cause of the conflagration.

While the consumer electronics and content industries worry that the battle between Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD will set company against company to the disadvantage of all, Europe's antitrust officials appear to fear that having two rival high-definition video disc formats isn't competition enough.

Book reviewC++ is the most used language in that most lucrative of fields: financial engineering. Yet most of the people who use it for derivatives have no formal training in programming, and often use C++ as little more than C, or even as a mutant form of Fortran. The results are not always pretty.

Is this the face of Palm's upcoming 3G Treo smart phone for Vodafone's European networks? Euro website MSMobiles.com seems to think so, claiming to have found the snap in Microsoft document, of all places.

Imagine CupTime is ticking, and we're flat out working on getting the digital recovery environment finished. It seems that despite some pretty damn good project planning, for students anyway, we're only a week or so away from deadline and we're still doing some of the development.

Net security firm McAfee reported reduced quarterly profits on Thursday. The company also warned it may have to restate past financial results because of a previously announced ongoing investigation into its stock option practices.

Geek TVTV story of the week comes straight outta Rio, where a jobless Brazilian actor stormed onto the set of a soap that had once employed him as an extra. (You know where I'm going with this, don't you?)

Idaho National Laboratory and the New York State Office of Cyber Security and Critical Infrastructure have teamed up with utilities and makers of distributed control system software to offer advice on how to make system security a major part of the critical infrastructure.

Google Earth aficionados have created a bonfire in the quiet town of Maasmechelen in Belgium, very close to the border with the Netherlands, by revealing that the fountain at the city council office looks like a swastika from the air.

Microsoft has pledged to spend "hundreds of millions" of dollars establishing its Zune music hardware and services combo while losing money on the package for the next few years. It'll take the company 3-5 years to make a significant impact to the market, it reckons.

A pair of laptops containing the personal data of around 31,000 US Navy personnel officers and potential recruits were separately stolen from two New Jersey recruitment offices over the last two months.

BenQ Mobile will next month ship its first set of mobile phone add-on speakers designed to be fed over a Bluetooth link. The stereo system is portable, running off batteries or an AC adaptor, and provides bass-boosting and stereo-widening, the company said.

Those Islington residents that were sitting on their balconies enjoying the 27 degree sunshine while having a quiet post-work pint yesterday afternoon, would have been bamboozled to hear colleagues today speaking of taking shelter to escape the terrible rain and hail.

The all-out nuclear war launch button Reg Hardware featured a couple of weeks ago - the gadget's a four-port USB hub in its spare time - is coming to the US and will be available to buy on Sunday, we've learned.

A new research project aims to harness search engine Google to find security flaws in open source code. Bugle identifies common vulns using a (thus far) limited set of Google queries. So far the search queries look for cross-site scripting, SQL injection and buffer overflow flaws, for example.

Valley JusticeTwo United States District Court judges recently handed down decisions in high-profile cases involving wiretapping and alleged records aggregation on behalf of the National Security Agency (NSA). The suits were brought against AT&T by plaintiffs in the Northern District of California with the legal “expertise” of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and in the Northern District of Illinois with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU.) The suits allege that AT&T violated constitutional and statutory protections against the disclosure of private information by providing telephone communications and subscriber information to the federal government.